johnrakestraw

johnrakestraw , 4 hours ago to bookstodon group

#FranzKafka: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

Quoted in Mark Herman’s introduction to his new translation of selected stories by Kafka.

@bookstodon #SundaySentence #reading

johnrakestraw , 3 days ago to bookstodon group

Ann Patchett: “If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, ‘I’ll be playing at Carnegie Hall next month!’ you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to The New Yorker” (‘This is the story of a happy marriage,’ p. 28).

Would that I had even a small bit of that courage (or audacity).

@bookstodon #writersBlock #perfectionism

johnrakestraw , 8 days ago to bookstodon group

We’re all – trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria – pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where #ecological and #evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of self into relationship.
#interconnections #relationships @bookstodon
--David Haskell, The Songs of Trees

johnrakestraw , 1 month ago to bookstodon group

An interesting piece about #writing, #reading, and a bit on collecting #firstEditions. There’s some irony in owning a first edition of #greatGatsby owned earlier by Dorothy Scarritt, Oppenheimer’s secretary at Los Alamos. And I had only a little twinge reading that one who just turned 40 might expect to read only 480 more books carefully if one manages to read one book a month.

Gift link: https://wapo.st/3K8hmHn

@bookstodon #bookstodon

johnrakestraw , 1 month ago to bookstodon group

Rebecca Solnit: "Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand." @bookstodon #hope #socialJustice